English 418
Second Language Acquisition
Session Ten Notes
Goals/Objectives:
1) To gain an understanding of the basic definitions of Anxiety
2) To examine the evidence that states that Anxiety can be viewed both positively and negatively
3) To understand the difference between Facilitative Anxiety and Debilitative Anxiety
4) To understand the difference between Trait Anxiety and State Anxiety
5) To understand how students use/misuse Defense Mechanisms
Questions/Main Ideas (Please Notes:
write these down as you think
 Anxiety
of them)
 All human beings, presumably, experience anxiety at one time or another
 Some people, however, are thought to be more anxious than others
 Some people have more severe reactions to anxiety-producing situations such that learning
can be impaired
 Anxiety
 Background Studies:
 Chastain (1975): Administered an anxiety scale to American university students
 Then correlated the students’ scores with their final course grade in a foreign language
course they were taking
 Anxiety
 Found that anxiety was a significant predictor for those studying Spanish
 Correlations were high, though not significant, across all other languages
Question?
 Why would it be higher for Spanish than other languages?
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Anxiety
Interestingly, the direction of the correlation was not always consistent
In some cases the correlation was negative - the bad effect of anxiety
In other cases, the correlation was positive - anxiety actually seemed to enhance
performance
Anxiety
Chastain then makes the distinction between facilitating anxiety and debilitating anxiety
Facilitating anxiety motivates the learner to ‘fight’ through the new learning task
It gears the learner to mobilize emotional resources to do the task
Question?
 What type of emotional resources do we have that we can mobilize?
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Anxiety
Debilitating anxiety, in contrast, motivates the learner to ‘flee’ from the new learning task
It stimulates the individual emotionally to adopt avoidance behaviors
Gets in the way of learning
Anxiety
An example of the interplay:
Kleinmann (1977): found that ESL students who scored high on items designed to measure
facilitative anxiety
(“nervousness while using English helps me do better”)
employed certain structures in English that low scorers tended to avoid
Anxiety
IOW, those students who scored high on facilitative anxiety “were emotionally equipped
to approach the structures that their peers tended to avoid”
Question?
 Why would this be important?
 Anxiety
 A further example:
 Bailey (1983): did a diary study of her own competitiveness and anxiety while learning
French
 Bailey realized that:
 Sometimes her drive to compete with other members of the class hindered her SLA
 At other times, it motivated her
 Anxiety
 Bailey’s experience suggests that it is not so much an individual’s permanent disposition
to anxiety
 Rather, it is the strength of the anxiety one is feeling at the moment which determines
whether anxiety is facilitating or debilitating
 Anxiety
 Anxiety, then, can serve both a good function and a bad function in SLA
 The idea is to build up just the right amount of anxiety to get onto a task
 To mobilize one’s cognitive (thinking) and affective (emotional) resources
 Once started on a task, however, the anxiety should be ‘demobilized’
 Anxiety
 Ehrman sets up an alternative dichotomy between Trait anxiety and State anxiety
 Trait anxiety is a stable part of a person’s personality
 State anxiety is related to specific events or situations
 Anxiety
 Good teaching relies on the facilitating anxiety implicit in challenges to the student that are
just a little beyond what they can do (but not too far)
 An appropriate level of competition between students can also facilitate anxiety or task
arousal
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Teachers need to find that optimal amount – not too much or too little
Anxiety
She recommends treating all anxiety as state anxiety
In this way, both teacher and student can perceive the anxiety as manageable, and not
inevitable
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Question?
 Looking at the survey form, what aspects of the language classroom seem to be causing the most anxiety?
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Anxiety
How does it play out?
Sometimes you will get a direct expression of the fact: “I’m very anxious about this test”
Often, however, you will need to infer the presence of anxiety through the behaviors that
are used to avert it
Anxiety
Everyone protects their emotional equilibrium and self-esteem in a variety of ways
The technical term for these is defense mechanisms
Everyone uses them
They are a natural part of life
Anxiety
Defense mechanisms can be seen as involving some sort of avoidance of discomfort, either
directly or by some sort of substitution
They compose a variety of behaviors, thought processes, and manipulations of feelings
Generally used unconsciously
Anxiety
Without defense mechanisms, we would be emotionally defenseless in a world where
defenses are needed
 Much of the time, we use defense mechanisms appropriately
 Anxiety
 They have a less functional side when they involve a degree of self-deception and reality
distortion
 When inappropriately used, they do not produce realistic adaptation
 Anxiety
 Anxiety, it should be noted, is not always about learning
 Sometimes is has to do more directly with relations with others
 IOW, social concern can affect learning
 Anxiety
 For example:
 Learners can suffer anxiety about performance that is a result of feeling in the spotlight
 Or being judged by others
 Thus, defense mechanisms can sometimes involve others in inappropriate ways
 Anxiety
 To see a description of various defense mechanisms:
 www.csub.edu/~ecase/Defense_Mechanisms.htm
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Questions?
 How might these mechanisms play out in the language classroom?
 Which mechanisms would be most problematic in a language classroom?
 Self-Efficacy
 The premise: Student feelings have as much power to affect their learning success as their
cognitive styles or strategies
 Self-esteem is important to all people, and we go to considerable lengths to defend it
 Self-Efficacy
 Self-esteem is often built on a sense of self-efficacy
 The perception of oneself as able or unable to learn can cause a self-fulfilling prophesy
 Self-Efficacy
 Students who perceive their own abilities as being low and who believe that ability is fixed
also tend to limit their own achievements
 If we can understand some of the fears behind behaviors, we can deal with them more
effectively
 Self-Efficacy
 Self-efficacy: The degree to which the student believes that he or she has the capacity to
cope with the learning challenge
 Enhanced efficacy, then, is a greater expectation of good results
 Self-Efficacy
 A learner can experience a sense of self-efficacy in one domain but not in others
 But a sense of effectiveness in one or more areas of skill can overflow into how one feels
about him- or herself in other areas
 Self-Efficacy
 Increased self-efficacy tends to increase motivation
 It also seems to increase the willingness to take risks
 Self-Efficacy
 Students who consider themselves poor learners are likely to want to:
 Learn in settings that reduce risk by reducing options
 Impose external structure
 Too much external structure reduces ability to deal with ambiguous or chaotic situations
 Self-Efficacy
 One group in which self-efficacy is often an issue: non-traditional students
 Feel a strong need for external structure and sequential learning
 May feel that they are inadequate compared to younger learners
 Feel afraid of holding others back
 Self-Efficacy
 Language learning activities can often constitute a particular assault on the self-esteem of
people
 This is often especially true of the older learner who may have had success in other aspects
of life or other academic subjects that require different skills
 Self-Efficacy
 Expectations of self are a subset of the beliefs a student has about learning in general
 Students may believe that “languages are difficult to learn”
 Only certain kinds of people can learn languages
 There is “a right way” to learn
 Self-Efficacy
 Students have to achieve 100% accuracy to do well
 All of these beliefs have an effect on a student’s sense of his or her ability to learn
 Of course, teachers also have beliefs
 Many of their assumptions are similar to their student’s beliefs
 Self-Efficacy
 How does it play out?
 Lack of self-efficacy can lead to very dependent behavior
 Can develop the belief that they are worse than they really are
 May want the teacher to be very demanding and impose a great deal of external structure
 Self-Efficacy
 Often wants the teacher to check their homework carefully
 Wants the teacher to guide them step-by-step in both daily activities and in homework
 Therefore, can blame the lack of progress on lack of strictness on the part of the teacher
 Self-Efficacy
 Such a student will need structured materials at the beginning
 Then should be challenged later with carefully selected and limited materials (in which
success is built in)
 Can also be given help in developing strategies for learning
 Self-Efficacy
 However, while a sense of self-efficacy is obviously important
 When it leads to overconfidence or rigidity, it is not helpful
 A student who is convinced that they are always right and that you (the teacher) are wrong
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Summary/Minute Paper:
is unlikely to change how learning is done
Self-Efficacy
Even when the task is not working out very well
Like all things in language learning, a sense of moderation is best
IOW, the best learner is someone who is confident, but not over-confident